The Death of Wordle
reeshill.net
reeshill.net
So what's the alternative system? One in which creators of delightful projects like Wordle are prevented somehow from making money from their creations? That seems weird and bad.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Endowment_for_the_Art...
The OP can also lament something without there being an alternative.
The opposite of corporate exploitation is not necessarily ‘no exploitation’ but more like a donation or microfinance type model, something where the owner sells directly to a consumer to exploit their production.
Did the creator sell to NYT because it was in line with their moral principles? Or was it more pragmatic due to living in a system where corporate exploitation is explicitly state sanctioned and therefore controls the majority of financial power?
Also, wordle fits perfectly with the rest of NYT’s puzzle games. Honestly, if I made wordle, I’d be honored to have my game land there, aside from the cool million(s).
So it makes sense for that to be it's new home. I'm disappointed I may have to start paying for it, but it's given me a lot of fun.
[1] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/davidmack/wordle-new-yo...
> As of May 2014, QuizUp had 20 million users and had raised over $26 million from venture capital investments.
I think these type of Trivia games have just one option, Cash it at the peak of the fad or wait till it gets replaced by another fad.
Considering NYT has dedicated subscribers for it's puzzle games, I think getting Wordle in it is a smart choice and perhaps may be they could turn it around profitably; Even if they don't I'm happy for Josh Wardle.
We need more such successful indie exit stories like this, When there's someone to buy Facebook's Liberapay and IBM's Watson then we need not be too critical about acquisition of a product loved by millions.
P.S. This is assuming the user base comprises avid daily players (which seems true.) They would definitely get their money's worth.
So up to $3.65 / year for avid users.
> now millions play the game daily
So a multiple of $3.65m a year! Payday without any need for third party motivations creeping in.
Heck, we’re already dealing with cookie prompts all over the web; if adding a “$0.01 per article” prompt means we can get rid of the ads and thus get rid of the cookie prompt, it’s not even a net loss for usability
People like creating, inventing, playing, when they are secure and happy. Most people don’t live in that state though.
Is this aspirational and unrealistic? Absolutely! I'm not claiming this is something we can do today, but I think it's good to think about where we might like to go.
Oh, were these things supposed to materialize for me for free with no effort on my part? Well, I suppose there's always prison, but I'd rather not.
Not sure how we get there though.
The fact it became really popular and he could then be financially rewarded for something he did anyway is just the icing on the cake.
Yeah, Wordle itself is not that complicated, and as you said, other than serving the HTML and JS it requires no server-side processing. I'm definitely going to download the HTML and JS and rehost it, at least just for myself privately.
To me, that's further reason why the Wordle purchase is sad. NYT is essentially buying some HTML, CSS, JS… and a playerbase. Rather than competing by improving their existing puzzles and/or creating new ones, they're just buying out the competition.
Even though technically-minded people like you and me will be able to re-host Wordle quite easily, the general public who lack those skills will still eventually lose access to the original independent Wordle.
I’m happy for the developers but wish it wasn’t necessary.
If this was a small business, I think I'd agree, but this was a fun side project by someone. If anything, it's a great payout for their side project that they may have never intended to monetize anyway, without breaking it for existing or future users (if they keep their promise of keeping it free and open).
There is no "promise" other than "initially free", which almost certainly guarantees it will soon be hosted on NYT and require their subscription to play.
In opposition to the platforms, we can create or play one of the million clones. Even non technical folks can find these.
The purchase of the game, for apparently "low seven digits", is going to spur tens of thousands of programmers to try to build the next Wordle. To try to capture some of that magic. That's how it works. There is absolutely nothing sad about this. And really the social magic of Wordle is retreating, so it's not like you were going to be anxiously playing your daily Wordle in six months.
NYT basically bought some hype and legitimacy. They seem flush with cash right now (didn't TFG say they were failed or something?), and seem to be massively overpaying for lots of things. They want to make people think of their games, so there you have it. Congrats to Wardle.
The original one, yes.
Paul Lutus[1] has made "Word Game" an open source Wordle clone on his website: https://arachnoid.com/wordgame/
Mobile friendly view: https://arachnoid.com/wordgame/mobile-display.html ; Announcement thread: https://old.reddit.com/r/wordle/comments/s69nma/word_game/ .
That's sort of the trade, isn't it? If independent creativity is regularly exploited for profit, that means people are always incentivized to create more. Would they really create as much in a system that offered few or no incentives?
Extrapolating this to "all creativity is exploited for financial gain" is silly. There are millions of websites full of independent creativity that are not being exploited for financial gain, mostly because there's no opportunity to do so.
This vision of a world where artists work only for the pure love of making art without considerations of money doesn't exist. It never existed. Artists gotta eat too.
And let's get real for a moment here. It's not War and Peace or Beethoven's 5th Symphony or something. It's a very slick version of hangman with an extremely clever virality mechanism. If it goes behind a paywall it will be a mild annoyance at best before people move on to something else. It's probably going to die down anyway as the fad passes.
This acquisition will forever be remembered as the best example of how NFTs work.
They didn't buy the copyright, the source code or any assets, but the de-facto distributed knowledge that they acquired the right to be considered the Wordle Owners.